Lonesome Monsters

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Bud Osborn is a working-class poet and a significant talent in the
tradition of Al Purdy and Milton Acorn. His people are the down and out.
His region is primarily the East End of Vancouver. Realism is his main
stylistic feature, along with an ability to maintain a balance between
justified anger and self-control. He shows us the outrageous cruelties
to which the poor can be subjected, and he captures what it must feel
like to become an objectified case in the eyes of a social worker. But
he doesn’t fall into inarticulate rage, dull preaching, or mawkish
sentimentality.

The poems in Lonesome Monsters tend to be short, with an imagist
influence. Some are haiku. There are also a few short stories. The
collection is capped by “Hounded to the Coast,” an excellent,
prize-winning 14-page prose-poem about a 69-hour bus ride from Toronto
to Vancouver.